Florence Naugrette examines the genesis and legacy of the nineteenth century’s most celebrated movement, romanticism. Whereas romanticism is often susceptible to being cast at the opposite end of the spectrum to classicism, Naugrette argues that it took its cues from wherever it could find them: the noble classical and neoclassical genres of tragedy and comedy; opera and comic opera; the Elizabethans; bourgeois drama; and popular genres including pantomime, féerie and above all melodrama. Romantic theatre thus appeared in all registers from comic to tragic, realist to fantastical. Naugrette also dispels the myth that Victor Hugo and his best known contemporaries Dumas, Vigny and Musset, all consecrated by posterity, were romantic theatre’s sole figureheads. She affords due credit to a host of other playwrights who contributed to the movement, notably women such as George Sand, Virginie Ancelot and Delphine de Girardin; and offers visibility to the actors and actresses who contributed to the success of the romantic theatre not only by playing its characters but also by inspiring playwrights and inventing new acting methods. Naugrette concludes by positing that French romanticism, originating predominantly in the French Revolution’s ethos of democratization, was also a nascent form of national popular theatre.

Mirosław Kocur defines ‘Staropolska’ as an umbrella term that is used to bring together multiple social, class, religious, ideological and aesthetic issues that signalled different cultural formations emerging in the period between the twelfth and the eighteenth centuries in a territory which was not ethnically or politically homogeneous. In the same constellation, Agnieszka Marszałek approaches Staropolska from the perspective of spectators and diverse publics and argues that its theatre was ‘a combination of changing ways of demonstrating belonging to various communities and representing specific particular interests, models of behaviour, as well as signalling one’s own presence (and separateness) within what was then called the state, society or the nation’. Marszałek insists that theatre became ‘Polish’ only with the establishment of a public theatre (1765–67). Even then, a knowledge of foreign languages (French, Italian, German) was crucial.